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Availability Engineering

Sun Tech Days in Beijing and Tokyo

I attended Sun Tech Days at Beijing and Tokyo a couple weeks ago. It was a 3-day event with one day dedicated to Open Solaris and NetBeans. The attendees in Beijing were mostly Java developers and university students. When in Tokyo the attendees were mostly developers from big enterprises with hands-on experience on Sun Cluster and/or other clustering technologies.

I did a presentation on Open High Availibility Cluster in both cities. The audience, especially in Tokyo, were very engaged in the talk. I got dozens of questions, mostly on hardware (network interface, storage device) supported by Open HA Cluster, quorum, live upgrade, and Oracle RAC on Open HA Cluster. There was even one question about Sun Cluster Geographical Edition.

I also got the opportunity to demonstrate Open HA Cluster on my laptop at the booth area. A lot of people stopped by, especially in Beijing, and looked at the demo. I had a failover Apache service configured on two zones in my laptop, running Solaris Express 9/07 and Sun Cluster Express 7/07. When the Apache service went down (killed with kill -9), Open HA Cluster would restart the service. When the zone was rebooted, Open HA Cluster would fail over the service to another zone. Many questions I got were about the hardware configuration on the laptop, scalable services, and Solaris zones. I got a lot of compliments on my little IBM Thinkpad X61S. It demonstrated that Open HA Cluster is ready to run on most laptops with off-the-shelf hardware.

A couple days after the event, I received an email from a manager at a company in Beijing, inquiring about documentations on setting up zones and Open HA Cluster on Solaris Express. This is encouraging. I am glad to see someone out there is exploring the technology from us.